Well, obviously if Germans didn't see value in IDN.com then they wouldn't have bought nearly all of them between 4 and 6 years ago! The country has over 80 million people, so the dot de namespace gets crowded real fast.

Try this test:

Using Google.de, I selected "Seiten auf Deutsch" (pages in German) - this also includes Austria, some of Switzerland, some of Belgium, etc, etc.

Well, those stats are only useful if you trust Google's indexes to be accurate, but they do provide some sort of picture.

I also have development possibilities since I can speak German, unlike Japanese. German PPC also seems to be on par or even higher than Japanese - my experience has been that the average is about 5 cents higher per click (22 cents with German, compared to 17 cents with Japanese). CTR is also higher since Germans aren't all surfing with mobile phones. And you don't have to contend with that damned yahoo - I hate that search engine, it's like a freaking roller coaster ride.